Map implementation vs. map reference query

Question

Hello all and Happy New Year.
I've written a Map implementation to store and retrieve values for a a class that needs to hold 80,00+ entries; performance is an issue, especially since it's a bucketed map with multiple values mapping to one key. everything worked as planned, but it was abysmally slow... after reading a bit on container performance for inspiration, I'm become a bit unclear as to whether I should really implement the class as a Map at all, or whether it makes more sense to just use one of Sun's implementations (like LinkedHashMap, for eg) and simply include it as a reference in the class. Nearly half of the reference material alluded to the latter case, which I didn't expect at all.
the question that's bothering me is this: when is a Map implementation preferable to a static reference, when I can just create a variable of type Map<String, List<String>> and use the entry set to do all of the work, since I really don't need to modify the method implementations? Is there a performance benefit, or is it just a matter of principle?
Thanks in advance for your input.
Melissa
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Answer 1

jverd wrote:Dude, your question makes less than zero sense.how sad. maybe thiis will help...
public class DuhReference {
Map<Duh1, Duh2> duhImAReference = new HashMap<Duh1, Duh2>();
vs.
public class DuhImplementation<K, V>  implements Map<K, V> {
//duh... gee, I guess this is the implementation then...
}Hope that helps. "Dude".